Hi, it has been a long time since my last update.
TeenAgent has been implemented into the main trunk of ScummVM, however it is not based upon my engine, instead Vladimir approached the ScummVM team a few months back with a rather complete engine, the engine itself is very tidy and the game is in a completable state.
Congratulations are in order to Vladimir for his incredible work on the game, surpassing any progress I would have been able to make with my poor reversing and coding skills.
The project was great fun and an incredible learning experience while working on it. I would like to thank _sev, Buddha, salty_horse and jvprat for their patience with me while I was learning.
I would also like to thank john_doe for his commits for the music support, as TeenAgent used a strange and new module format for music. I have great respect for everyone who helped me learn. It will not be my last attempt.
I have recently been looking into the code used for Maniac Mansion sound effects on the Apple II.
A little history on the Apple II:
When Maniac Mansion was ported to the Apple II(around the same time as the C64 port) it was seen as a very ugly version, in comparison to the C64 version. It had some graphical issues and didnt include scrolling. Unfortunately the port also suffered in a worse way. While the C64 had the SID chip, an incredible sound chip allowing for some really interesting sound effects, the Apple II port had to make do with a REALLY basic speaker. The Apple II port used the speaker to generate some sound effects such as the character selection ‘click’. Unfortunately the speaker could only output a square wave ‘click’ when the port was addressed(using a ‘bit $C030 command) The speaker itself had not options for changing the output or frequency of the output.
This of course left games programmers with very little to play with, many of them came up with intelligent code that would call the speaker multiple times using various loops to ‘click’ their way into something vaguely audible. Maniac Mansion was no different. Lucasarts created a resource format which consisted of a collection of various bytes which told the code how it should ‘click’ the speaker.
The resource format is incredibly simple and the resource is simply read in by the code which judges how often and when it should click the speaker.
I am currently about half way through reversing the code(6502 ASM), I have converted about half of it to c++ and am planning on finishing the rest within the next few months(there isnt much, I just do not have much time with university commitments, as it is my final year any external work has to sit on the backburner until I get stuck with my university work :p)
I would like to thank Tobias for his patience with me, he has been especially helpful as he has not ever given me the answer, rather he provides ways for me to find the answer and makes sure I understand it. He has been so helpful in explaining some of the 6502 opcodes and explaining how they were used. I am greatful for his friendship and advice.
Though this code is not very complicated, I am still struggling to understand completely what it does. I am sure this will come to me.
EDIT:
I have documented all I know about the resource format on the ScummVM wiki here : http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SCUMM/V0/Maniac_Mansion_Apple_II
Though this information is pretty irrelevant, since the code is what actually makes sense. The resource is simply a loop controller.